Confused by the behaviour of "front page" / "home" templates

I stumbled upon a confusing issue while trying to customize the appearance of the front page of my blog (blog.example.com) without changing the behaviour of the other blog posts index pages (http://ift.tt/1z6WgOi).

The problem is that I can't seem to find a way to add a template for the front page that doesn't affect the other list pages:

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  according to wphierarchy.com and to the rather confusingly worded codex entry, it looks like front-page.php is what I'm after, but if I provide that, the blog posts index pages are affected by it as well!

  
  


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  if I modify home.php, both the home page and the index pages are affected, as correctly documented

  
  


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  adding a custom page template and setting the front page to use a page with that template set doesn't work either! the index pages still end up calling the page-foo.php template

  
  

What am I doing wrong?